Grandma's Apartment

Light has left stains along the walls like shadows of exploded memory; After images behind objects that glow with an aura of effervescence, cramped and unchanged and rotting away in the corners. A mind held captive- A nostalgia that suddenly feels all too small, for the hands that have grown around the objects put down by youth. Too small and dingy gold. The porcelain goose became a swan, when perched above the television. A game of no consequence that suddenly feels so dire, like moving it would be checkmate, when it no longer migrates back to the table with the shells. Porcelain becoming stone. Displaced seashells in glass trays too, bleached by immobility, (same as the chair, that bows inward with the creases of every cheek, that smiled or cried upon it), Remember in these early hours, the sands from which they came, and the cool, fresh waters that used to flow through them, the lives they housed. But walls contain; twist like twine to bind the frayed edges of bone spurs, a growth spurt in the final stretch, flexing out of its own skin, and chipping away at the pepto pink tiles, to reveal the smell of talc, and a deeper longing, that has festered in the dark.